The U.S. government is pulling its funding for drugmaker Moderna to continue testing an mRNA vaccine intended to protect people from the bird flu.The move came a day after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the government would stop recommending the COVID-19 vaccine, which also commonly uses mRNA technology, for healthy children and pregnant women.
“After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable,” Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said via an emailed statement. “This is not simply about efficacy—it’s about safety, integrity, and trust. The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public.”
The government had awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to Moderna, including $590 million in January.
What if we could outsmart a pandemic virus even before it emerges? With the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) landscape, this hypothetical is becoming a public health reality. From predicting which viral family the next pandemic may spill over from, to forecasting how a virus might evolve, AI is reshaping the way the world can prepare for and respond to pandemic threats.
As these growing capabilities gather pace, we also recognize the essential need to ensure their use is responsible, ethical and secure. The need to strike this balance is being recognized increasingly across the world.
The Trump administration has delivered its latest blow to vaccines, canceling a nearly $600-million contract to the drugmaker Moderna that was intended to develop a shot for humans against bird flu.
The decision also forfeited the U.S. government’s right to purchase doses ahead of a pandemic, and canceled an agreement set up by the Biden administration in January to prepare the nation for a potential bird flu pandemic. The Moderna contract built on a previous government investment of $175 million last year.
The move was not entirely unexpected. The Department of Health and Human Services said earlier this year that it was reviewing the contract. And Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly questioned the safety of mRNA technology, which is used in Moderna’s Covid vaccine.
First used for the Covid vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of the virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response.
Andrew Nixon, a Health and Human Services spokesman, said: “After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable.”
For several years, a type of avian flu known as H5N1 has circulated around the world, killing wild birds and domestic flocks, and spreading to a range of other species including bears and sea mammals.
It arrived in the United States in 2022, and has resulted in the culling of more than 173 million birds, frequently devastating commercial poultry flocks.
Last year, bird flu also spread to dairy cattle. It has since struck more than 1,000 herds in 17 states and sickened 70 people, most of them dairy or cattle workers. In January, Louisiana reported the death of an older adult who had interacted with sick backyard birds, the first such fatality in the United States.
So far, the virus does not seem to spread easily among people. But scientists have long worried about a bird flu pandemic because flu viruses can rapidly mutate and acquire new abilities.
The national stockpile holds a few million doses of an existing H5N1 vaccine to protect humans. But it is unclear whether the shots would continue to protect Americans if the virus were to change significantly. The government has three other avian flu contracts, according to the health department.
Many scientists regard mRNA vaccines, which can be quickly altered to match the newest versions of virus, as the best option for protecting Americans in a fast-moving outbreak.
“When the next flu pandemic occurs, there is not going to be enough vaccine for everyone who wants it unless we invest to broaden the types of flu vaccines being made and the number of companies that make them,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.
“We shouldn’t let politically motivated attempts to unfairly brand mRNA vaccines as dangerous stand in the way of ensuring everyone who wants a pandemic vaccine can get one,” she said.
Moderna’s contract covered several types of flu viruses that have the potential to cause a pandemic. In response to the government’s decision, Moderna said it would explore alternatives for developing its vaccines.
Mr. Kennedy’s ideas for containing bird flu are unorthodox. He has suggested that instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers should let the virus run through the flocks. Then, he has said, farmers should identify birds that survive the illness and study them to identify the source of their immunity. Many scientists assert that would be inhumane and dangerous.
Last week, Mr. Kennedy urged the Canadian authorities not to kill 400 ostriches that had been exposed to H5N1, and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid, offered to relocate the birds to his ranch in Florida.
Mr. Kennedy has long waged a campaign against some vaccines, particularly those based on mRNA. He has incorrectly and repeatedly said that the Covid vaccines using mRNA were the “deadliest” vaccines ever made.
Experts said his views were out of step with the science.
“Pandemic preparedness is about being proactive, fast and adaptable — the mRNA vaccine platform is all of that,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“The rationale given is likely fabricated and more of a function of R.F.K. Jr.’s assault on vaccines, the value of which he evades,” he added. “Canceling this contract makes the world less safe.”
Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health, with a focus on infectious diseases, pandemics and the public health agencies that try to manage them.
The post U.S. Cancels Contract With Moderna to Develop Bird Flu Vaccine appeared first on New York Times.
The federal government announced Wednesday that it is cancelling a contract to develop a vaccine to protect people against flu viruses that could cause pandemics, including the bird flu virus that's been spreading among dairy cows in the U.S., citing concerns about the safety of the mRNA technology being used.
The Department of Health and Human Services said it is terminating a $766 million contract with the vaccine company Moderna to develop an mRNA vaccine to protect people against flu strains with pandemic potential, including the H5N1 bird flu virus that's been raising fears.
"After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna's H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable," HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
"This is not simply about efficacy — it's about safety, integrity, and trust. The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public," Nixon said.
He added that "the move signals a shift in federal vaccine funding priorities toward platforms with better-established safety profiles and transparent data practices. HHS remains committed to advancing pandemic preparedness through technologies that are evidence-based, ethically grounded, and publicly accountable." The official did not provide any additional details.
Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of Brown University's Pandemic Center, said the decision was "disappointing, but unsurprising given the politically-motivated, evidence-free rhetoric that tries to paint mRNA vaccines as being dangerous."
"While there are other means of making flu vaccines in a pandemic, they are slower and some rely on eggs, which may be in short supply," Nuzzo added in an email. "What we learned clearly during the last influenza pandemic is there are only a few companies in the world that make flu vaccines, which means in a pandemic there won't be enough to go around. If the U.S. wants to make sure it can get enough vaccines for every American who wants them during a pandemic, it should invest in multiple types of vaccines instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket."
The cancellation comes even though Moderna says a study involving 300 healthy adults had produced "positive interim" results and the company "had previously expected to advance the program to late-stage development."
"While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile observed in this interim analysis of the Phase 1/2 study of our H5 avian flu vaccine and we will explore alternative paths forward for the program," Stéphane Bancel, Moderna's chief executive officer, said in a statement. "These clinical data in pandemic influenza underscore the critical role mRNA technology has played as a countermeasure to emerging health threats."
The administration's move drew sharp criticism from outside experts.
"This decision puts the lives and health of the American people at risk," said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown School of Public Health, who served as President Biden's COVID-19 response coordinator.
"Bird Flu is a well known threat and the virus has continued to evolve. If the virus develops the ability to spread from person to person, we could see a large number of people get sick and die from this infection," Jha said. "The program to develop the next generation of vaccines was essential to protecting Americans. The attack by the Administration on the mRNA vaccine platform is absurd."
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota agreed.
"This decision will make our country far less prepared to respond to the next influenza pandemic," he said in an email. "This is a dangerous course to follow."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the H5N1 flu virus has spread to 41 dairy herds, and 24 poultry farms and culling operations, and caused 70 human cases. While the virus has had a high mortality rate in other countries, so far H5N1 has only caused one death in the U.S. and has not shown any signs of spreading easily from one person to another. But infectious disease experts are concerned that the more the virus spreads, the greater the chance it could mutate into a form that would spread from person to person, which would increase the risk of a pandemic.
Five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 82 days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, dozens of people gathered in a Washington D.C. townhouse to celebrate Jay Bhattacharya, who had recently been confirmed as director of the National Institutes of Health, the world’s top agency for biomedical research. Most of the guests were not scientists or beltway insiders, but citizen-activists like Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia photographer and mother who gained an online following during the pandemic for her sharp criticism of public health policy. In a picture posted on Facebook, she stands next to Bhattacharya, who is dressed in a plaid shirt and gray blazer, smiling while holding what looks like a tall glass of ice water.
Though countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, sometimes collectively called the Global South, are increasingly central to scientific research, disease surveillance, and public health innovation, they historically have had little say in the shaping of policies meant to keep international health crises at bay. They were to provide the pathogen samples, for example, so that wealthier countries could develop vaccines. Poorer countries, though, couldn’t expect equitable access to the knowledge and medicine that came from their contributions. During health scares, they have been last in line for access to life-saving technologies.
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the implications of this inequality: By late 2021, high-income countries, for example, were averaging more than one vaccine dose per person while low-income countries were administering fewer than four doses per hundred people. And while wealthy countries could develop and distribute vaccines, the African continent, by and large, could not. The recently adopted Pandemic Agreement, emphasizing thing like the need for stronger health systems, better resource sharing, and rapid local manufacturing of vaccines is a step in the right direction, but there is more that still needs to happen to address the world’s uneven ability to prepare for or respond to pandemics. Global health forums like the World Health Assembly, where the pandemic agreement was recently approved, need to fully incorporate the voices and expertise of young people in the Global South, where 90 percent of the world’s 15- to 24-year-olds live.
At the 2023 World Health Assembly, which is the governing body of the World Health Organization (WHO), only 13 of 194 member states included young delegates. That’s less than 7 percent of countries, most of which were high-income. Even when young people participate in these delegations, the roles are limited to advocacy or advisory input, risking a loss of ideas that could strengthen real-world preparedness and response. This absence is particularly striking given how acutely young people are affected by biological threats—from disrupted education and social well-being to long-term economic and mental health impacts.
Young people are already shaping how the world responds to biological threats and helping build the systems that support equitable public health. During COVID, an initiative in Micronesia tackled misinformation by helping shape a direct communication campaign that reached over 20,000 people and improved vaccine uptake by over 30 percent, blending tech-savviness with cultural insight. In Uganda, a group of young people mapped the underserved border districts hit hardest by COVID. Using an existing open-map database, they helped turn blank areas into usable data, supporting government and frontline responders in their efforts.
Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center and Professor of Epidemiology at Brown University, reviews depictions of epidemics in Twilight (2008), The Last of Us (2023), Outbreak (1995), and Contagion (2011), and discusses how they relate to real public health systems today.
This video was created by BPR Producer Clara Baisinger-Rosen. The BPRM Video Team is led by Ayana Ahuja, and the BPR Multimedia Board is led by Solomon Goluboff-Schragger. Special Thanks to Jennifer Nuzzo, Amina Fayaz, Elliot Smith, Jordan Lac, and Grace Leclerc.
The Covid-19 virus in the U.S. has largely faded from view. But it hasn't faded away.
National wastewater data shows low Covid-19 activity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The weekly reported Covid-19 deaths in April were slightly down compared with the same time a year earlier, federal data shows. Still, more than 300 Covid-19-related deaths were reported weekly as recently as mid-April.
Some infectious-disease specialists said they expect more cases this summer, as there have been somewhat regular summertime increases in the past. Others cautioned that Covid-19 can still surprise us, more than five years after it spurred a global pandemic that killed more than 1.2 million Americans.
"It is at our lowest levels it has been since the beginning of the pandemic," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "Our challenge is we don't know what that means for tomorrow."
The Trump administration on Tuesday released a more stringent set of guidelines for approving Covid-19 vaccines , requiring randomized controlled trials for new Covid-19 vaccines for many children and adults. The Food and Drug Administration expects it will be able to approve shots for adults older than 64 and other high-risk groups based on antibody testing.
The original Covid-19 shots were tested in large, randomized trials with placebos. The vaccines updated to match newer versions of the virus have been tested with antibody testing to ensure that they triggered an immune response.
As of May 10, the CDC projected that 70% of cases were caused by a version of the virus called LP.8.1. It is an offshoot of the Omicron variant, which first appeared in late 2021, and is related to the JN.1 variant, which was the target of last season's booster shots. The LP.8.1 version has picked up new mutations but hasn't yet led to an increase in cases or hospitalizations.
"Because there are so many people who have been vaccinated and infected, there is a high amount of immunity in the population," said Andrew Pekosz, director of the Center for Emerging Viruses and Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University. "I think we're also seeing that as a way to dampen the spread of the virus."
Surveillance and monitoring for changes in the virus are continuing, Pekosz said, but at much lower levels than before, so there is more reliance on modeling to suss out variant spread. Hospitalization and death data remains the most reliable, though that data is now slower to arrive, some researchers said. All hospitals were no longer required to report data as of the close of April 2024, one of several data changes made at the end of the public health emergency.
Deaths from the virus are heavily concentrated among adults ages 65 and above, with more than 81% of Covid-related deaths occurring in that group, according to the CDC. But people of all ages can get seriously ill from a Covid-19 infection, the agency said, especially those with underlying medical conditions.
Covid-related hospitalizations in the U.S. are currently on the decline. There were some 1.3 hospitalizations per 100,000 people during the week ended April 26, down from a winter peak of 4.2 per 100,000 people for the week ended Jan. 4, CDC data shows. That rate is down from the winter of 2023-24, when hospitalization rates peaked at 7.8 per 100,000 people. The data is from a surveillance network of acute-care hospitals across 13 states.
Most years, the U.S. has experienced additional Covid-19 waves in late spring or summer, in addition to wintertime surges. Last year, a summertime wave peaked at around the week of Aug. 31, with more than 1,300 deaths reported, CDC data shows. Still, the virus has yet to fall into a fully predictable seasonal pattern, infectious-disease experts said.
"While we're in a better place this year than we were in previous years, I cannot tell you we will always continue to be in a better place," said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the pandemic center at Brown University. "There's still a lot of questions we don't have answers to."
Write to Brianna Abbott at brianna.abbott@wsj.com
By Brianna Abbott
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Copyright 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The termination letter arrived in Sabra Klein’s email inbox on March 25, telling her to immediately stop all work on a $10.9 million, five-year grant to research variations in people’s immune responses to COVID-19.
The grant funded the Serological Science Center of Excellence, which Klein, PhD ’98, MS, MA, a professor in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (MMI), had to shut down that day, along with her fellow investigators across the National Cancer Institute’s Serological Sciences Network (SeroNet), which encompassed 25 research institutions. Klein and her co-principal investigator, Infectious Disease Professor Andrea L. Cox, MD, PhD, supported 40 workers across the schools of Public Health and Medicine. Klein had no choice but to immediately let go of four people from her team.
Health officials are making a renewed call for vigilance against bird flu, but some experts are puzzling over why reports of new human cases have stopped.
Has the search for cases been weakened by government cuts? Are immigrant farm workers, who have accounted for many of the U.S. cases, more afraid to come forward for testing amid the Trump administration’s deportation push? Is it just a natural ebb in infections?
“We just don’t know why there haven’t been cases,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “I think we should assume there are infections that are occurring in farmworkers that just aren’t being detected.”
The H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely among wild birds, poultry and other animals around the world for several years, and starting early last year became a problem in people and cows in the U.S.
Early last month, after two Texas children had died of measles, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged that the MMR vaccine prevents the spread of that virus. But later that day, he posted photos of himself with anti-vaccine doctors, calling them "extraordinary healers" and promoting unproven treatments.
In a television interview three days later, Kennedy, the nation's top health official, encouraged vaccination for measles. In the same conversation, he cast doubt on whether one of the children had actually died of measles-related complications.
And in an interview with Phil McGraw at the end of April, Kennedy said of the measles vaccine: "HHS continues to recommend that vaccine. But there are problems with the vaccine."
With the nation in the grip of the deadliest measles outbreak in decades, Kennedy is equivocating with a worried U.S. public, health experts said. His mixed message appeals to vaccine believers and skeptics, muddying public health instructions at a time when clarity is essential.
Elevated from longtime anti-vaccine activist to guardian of the nation's health, Kennedy is trying to appeal to both sides: the public, which largely supports vaccination, and the anti-vaccine hard-liners who helped propel his rise. His "doublespeak," as public health experts and academics who follow the anti-vaccine movement call it, gives him cover with both groups, allowing him to court public opinion while still assuaging his anti-vaccine base.
At least half of adults are uncertain whether to believe false claims about measles, its vaccine and its treatment, according to an April poll by the health-care think tank KFF.
"It's confusing, and maybe that's part of the strategy," said Bruce Gellin, who oversaw HHS's vaccine program in the Bush and Obama administrations. Gellin noted that confusion could lead parents to opt out of vaccination — exactly what health officials don't want in an outbreak.
In a statement about vaccination, HHS said: "Secretary Kennedy's HHS has pledged radical transparency to the American public. This means being honest and straightforward about what we know — and what we don't know — about medical products, including vaccines."
Vaccines go through several stages of clinical trials, are tested on thousands of people, and are monitored after they are rolled out for any adverse events. Medical experts say they are safe, effective and considered one of the best tools for protecting public health.
When asked about the unproven treatments Kennedy had promoted, an HHS spokesperson said Kennedy will be enlisting the scientific community and the department to "activate a scientific process to treat a host of diseases, including measles, with single or multiple existing drugs in combination with vitamins and other modalities." It is unclear what that will entail, but Kennedy has long advocated the use of vitamins and supplements.
Kennedy is scheduled to appear Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, where he is expected to face questions on his vaccine policies.
The outbreak in Texas has spread across the state and beyond, including a significant uptick of cases in El Paso. Experts worry the United States this year will record the largest number of cases since measles was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago. A recent study showed that if U.S. vaccination rates continue to decline, the nation could face millions of cases over the next 25 years.
Once an outbreak begins, health officials have only a short time to convince the U.S. public that vaccination is the proven way to save lives, said Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition. The MMR vaccine — which protects against measles, mumps and rubella — is safe and effective, public health experts say.
"The public's confused, and local and state health officials on the ground are really having to carry a whole lot of water without having … all that backup that they're used to," Juliano said.
Some vaccine skeptics say they are also frustrated about Kennedy's mixed messaging because he has not gone far enough to condemn immunization. But they are urging followers to stick with him.
After Kennedy's social media post encouraging vaccination, the chief executive of the anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded said in a video message posted to X: "What he says does not speak for Children's Health Defense in any way at this point." But, Mary Holland said, "we have to respect the role that he's in."
In an interview, Holland said she didn't believe Kennedy considered his statement sufficient. "I don't think he probably thinks that's the whole story. So we have gone out with additional information," she said.
On the day she posted that message, her group reached out to its subscribers: "HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is breaking down the government-sanctioned roadblocks erected to protect Big Pharma's profits and keep people in the dark about childhood vaccines," her email read.
Another Kennedy ally, Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccine activist who served as Kennedy's communications director during his presidential run, said the secretary "is trying to speak to all sides."
With Kennedy as head of HHS, President Donald Trump has offered more tepid support for vaccination than he did during his first term. HHS has largely silenced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the outbreak. And HHS has appointed a vaccine skeptic to investigate the debunked link between vaccination and autism.
The fact that anti-vaccine activists still count Kennedy as an ally shouldn't be a surprise, said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California College of the Law at San Francisco, whose research focuses on public health law and anti-vaccine forces.
"Our health and human services secretary has been anti-vaccine for 20 years and has been the secretary for two months," she said in April. "He's still an anti-vaccine activist."
In response, HHS said, "Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability."
Following the second child's death in Texas, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), leader of the Senate health committee, called on "top health officials" to promote vaccination. Shortly thereafter, Kennedy wrote in an X post that "the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine."
Hours later in a separate X post, he went on to praise the work of two local doctors who have criticized measles vaccination, and their treatment of measles patients with unproven therapies — budesonide and clarithromycin. Neither has been proved effective as measles treatments and both could have serious side effects, medical experts have said.
The media "don't notice how he de-emphasizes [vaccination] by just burying it in with a bunch of the other stuff about vitamin A, steroids, better diet, etc.," said David Gorski, managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, a website run primarily by physicians that debunks medical misinformation. "It's like they've learned nothing."
Between those two statements, Kennedy drew headlines that portrayed him as a supporter of vaccines, including "Kennedy announces support for measles vaccine amid outbreak" in Politico and "RFK Jr. makes new push for vaccine after 2nd child dies of measles" on Today.com.
After a CBS News interview released a few days later, Kennedy received similar coverage. An initial clip highlighted Kennedy saying he "encourages" vaccination — but left out the context of his saying he was unsure whether the second child's death was due to measles. Kennedy also falsely stated again that vaccines are not properly safety-tested, a claim he has made repeatedly.
In the interview with McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, Kennedy claimed that one of his top three priorities is "making sure the vaccines are safe." He said, erroneously, that the mumps portion and the combination MMR vaccine were never safety-tested. Medical experts said the MMR vaccine has been monitored for decades.
In response to questions about these claims, HHS said Kennedy would institute placebo testing for all "new vaccines," but it did not fully clarify what that would mean. Medical experts say if that form of testing is applied to already approved vaccines, it could be unethical in some cases.
Kennedy also told an audience member he's looking into whether children develop autism after they receive the MMR vaccine — a link that has been thoroughly debunked. More than a dozen studies in peer-reviewed top journals in recent decades have rejected this link.
When Kennedy talks, he "mixes a blend of fact and fiction, and since he is the highest health official in the country, that's dangerous," said Tom Frieden, CDC director under President Barack Obama and president and chief executive of the nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. "Health advice is best provided by doctors who are deeply experienced with the facts about vaccines, and anything that undermines trust in measles and other vaccines undermines the health and safety of our kids."
When it comes to news about measles, Kennedy allies have released information to develop a narrative around the illness before others can debunk it.
On April 5, controversial scientist Robert Malone was the first to write that "Another Texas Child Dies a Tragic Death After Recovering from Measles."
According to Malone, medical mismanagement was to blame. In a Substack post to his hundreds of thousands of followers, Malone said he wrote after hearing from a physician he said had knowledge of the child's care.
The press was amplifying the measles outbreak for the "political purposes" of smearing Kennedy, Malone told The Post. Malone previously sued The Post, alleging defamation over the newspaper's reporting on his advocacy against the coronavirus vaccine. The case was dismissed in 2023.
A day after Malone's Substack account, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported the "second measles death" in a "school-aged child who tested positive for measles." The child died of what "doctors described as measles pulmonary failure. The child was not vaccinated and had no reported underlying conditions."
Craig Spencer, an associate professor of public health and emergency medicine at Brown University, who monitors the rhetoric of the anti-vaccine movement, said he was struck by Kennedy's post endorsing vaccines as the most effective way to prevent measles' spread. He took note that the phrase came in the third paragraph of a long post. And he said the post on X was edited to add language suggesting the measles outbreak was "flattening," which independent fact-checkers and experts have said is misleading.
Spencer interpreted the message and its revision as an attempt to speak to two audiences.
"If you look at all the replies, it was a mix of basically, 'Look, he says vaccines are really important' and 'Oh, my God, I can't believe you are betraying us,'" Spencer said. "It was fascinating to see how people saw this moment different."
Children's Health Defense, Kennedy's former organization, also has published information about the ongoing measles outbreak. Some of it has highlighted the doctors Kennedy praised. The organization's advocates have argued that measles may not have killed them, suggesting poor medical treatment and other medical conditions might have.
The group, along with others, has sued The Post and other news organizations on antitrust grounds alleging suppression of what it claims is "wholly accurate and legitimate reporting" about vaccine danger.
On CBS News, Kennedy also argued that the second child that Texas health officials said died due to measles succumbed to other medical conditions.
This is all part of the playbook for Kennedy and his allies, said Tara Smith, an epidemiologist who follows anti-vaccine groups.
"It's just something that they have really gotten good at over the years, is a kind of doublespeak," she said.
Caitlin Gilbert, Fenit Nirappil, Rachel Roubein and Lena H. Sun contributed to this report.
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Copyright WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post May 11, 2025
Five years after the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, School of Public Health experts look to Washington as they weigh in on where our biosurveillance tools and preparedness systems stand now: What’s changed, what hasn’t and what must be built to make us ready for the next pandemic?
LOOSENING UP — The continued spread of measles throughout the country isn’t stopping some states from trying to make it easier for parents to skirt school vaccine requirements for their children, POLITICO’s Lauren Gardner reports.
Idaho and West Virginia lawmakers recently loosened rules on vaccine mandates, while lawmakers from Florida, Louisiana and Texas are weighing measures that would make it more difficult for health providers to deny care — from organ transplants to pediatric well visits — to people who aren’t vaccinated.
Why it matters: The state efforts, among others that would crack down on the use of certain vaccines, come amid longtime vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ascent to power in Washington as HHS secretary.
Texas, which has been the cradle of domestic vaccine resistance for the past decade, is now the epicenter of an exploding measles outbreak.
The Office of the Provost, in conjunction with the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, sponsors year-long fellowships for Brown University faculty members to conduct research on Brown University's historical legacy.
This fellowship in University History represents Brown's ongoing commitment to uncovering and understanding its institutional history through scholarly research and community engagement. One fellowship is awarded per year.
In support of work on their project, the fellow receives one-course release during the fellowship year, research funds of $2,500, and the support of one Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA) to assist with research activities. Fellows become integral members of the JNBC scholarly community, participating in seminars and other intellectual activities.
Peering into wastewater for public health has a history dating back at least to the late 19th century, when a biologist in Boston cultured sewage in beef jelly, bouillon, boiled potatoes, and milk to see if anything would grow. Later, scientists in Scotland looked at wastewater to assess the spread of typhoid. After injecting monkeys with sewage in the 1930s, American researchers realized that wastewater polio virus concentrations correlated with community infections. It was the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that led to skyrocketing investment in wastewater disease surveillance in the United States—this time with the aid of modern biotechnology and without bouillon or monkeys.
As COVID transitioned from a deadly novelty to something closer to a mundane nuisance, testing for the virus fell off a cliff. Wastewater surveillance became central to public health officials’ ability to track COVID. The same is true for other threats, like H5N1 avian influenza. Bird flu has now spread from wild birds, to poultry, to cattle, and, worryingly, to a wide variety of other mammals, including people. Still testing remains limited. The federal government has invested at least $500 million in building wastewater-surveillance capacity since 2021. But that funding expires in September. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist who is the director of The Brown University Pandemic Center, told me we may soon be left with an even murkier understanding of how diseases like COVID and bird flu are spreading.
With the United States facing its largest single measles outbreak in 25 years, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will direct federal health agencies to explore potential new treatments for the disease, including vitamins, according to an H.H.S. spokesman. The decision is the latest in a series of actions by the nation’s top health official that experts fear will undermine public confidence in vaccines as an essential public health tool.
The announcement comes as Mr. Kennedy faces intense backlash for his handling ofthe outbreak. It has swept through large areas of the Southwest where vaccination rates are low, infecting hundreds and killing two young girls. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 930 cases nationwide, most of which are associated with the Southwest outbreak.
Eight Brown faculty members were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this year alongside 240 other individuals, the Academy announced on April 23.
The Academy, which was founded in 1780, honors interdisciplinary scholars who are innovative leaders in their fields. Every year, the Academy elects new members who will engage in “cross-disciplinary efforts to produce reflective, independent and pragmatic studies that inform public policy and advance the public good,” according to its website.
In this episode, Joseph Harris explores the actions taken by the Trump administration to dismantle U.S. foreign aid and the consequences that these actions will have for global health. He sits down with Dr. Beth Cameron, a former Senior Adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); Nidhi Bouri, former Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID; Dr. Brooke Nichols, Associate Professor of Global Health at Boston University and creator of as U.S. aid freeze impact tracker; and Sheena Adams, Global Communications Director for The Accountability Lab, which launched its own Global Aid Freeze Tracker.
Soon after President Donald J. Trump took office for his second term, thousands of health websites run by the federal government that kept the public informed about infectious diseases, mental health, vaccines and more were taken offline.
Many eventually returned — in large part because a judge ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to temporarily restore the pages — but some had been altered, with sections on topics such as health equity and teen pregnancy deleted. The changes, along with uncertainty around the future of these sites, has led some public health experts to question whether the websites can still be trusted as the gold standard of trustworthy health information, as they’ve long been regarded.
Federal health agencies are already facing a crisis of confidence. When a recent national poll asked respondents how much trust they had in the C.D.C. to make the right health recommendations, more than one-third replied “not much” or “not at all.” Nearly half said the same about the Food and Drug Administration.
Experts fear that with less trust in public health institutions, more people seeking medical information might turn to social media, where misinformation is rampant. That has made it all the more valuable for the public to find evidenced-based sources of health information.
Here are five websites run by independent organizations that have accurate, easy-to-understand information.
The vacuum left by the US threatens irreparable damage to global health institutions, with the WHO bearing a disproportionate burden. The organisation must view this crisis as an opportunity to develop into an entity that is leaner with greater agency to carry out its most essential, life-saving tasks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is in a moment of crisis. The decision by the US to withdraw from the organisation leaves the WHO with a deficit of about 15% of its total funding through the end of 2025 and 45% projected for 2026-27.
With their election to the prestigious honor society, eight members of the Brown University faculty join the nation’s leading scholars in science, public affairs, business, arts and the humanities.
Significant changes to the way commercial operations raise and product poultry may need to occur to stop the current outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).
“Farms were built for efficiency. They were built for production. They weren’t necessarily built for disease control or biosecurity in mind,” Kay Russo, DVM, partner/veterinarian, RSM Consulting, said during the April 12 webinar, “What we know (or don’t) about H5N1 transmission on farms,” hosted by The Pandemic Center, part of the Brown University School of Public Health.
WASHINGTON, April 22, 2025: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) announced today that Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron and Dr. Stephanie Psaki have been appointed as non-resident senior advisers with the CSIS Global Health Policy Center.
Cameron and Psaki are global leaders in health security and biodefense with experience across academia, nonprofit organizations, and in government, including establishing global health security missions at the White House. Dr. Cameron is a professor of the practice and senior advisor to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Psaki recently joined the Brown School of Public Health as a distinguished senior fellow and formerly served as special assistant to the president and the inaugural U.S. coordinator for global health security at the White House.
According to attendees at Stanford’s first-ever Forum on Sustainable and Healthy Buildings, clean and well-ventilated indoor air should be considered as essential to public health as clean water. From March 30 to April 1, the conference served as a rare cross-sector convention focused on advancing national indoor air quality (IAQ) by minimizing indoor pollutants.
Over two days, 24 stakeholders from institutions like the California Department of Public Health, U.S. Green Building Council and the International WELL Building Institute debated the most effective actions to implement IAQ guidelines that could soon be monitored in commercial and residential buildings.
Influenza epidemics, a major contributor to global morbidity and mortality, are influenced by climate factors including absolute humidity and temperature. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of climate extremes, potentially impacting the duration and magnitude of future influenza epidemics. However, the extent of these projected effects on influenza outbreaks remains understudied. Here, we use an epidemiologic model adapted for temperate and tropical climates to explore how climate variability may affect seasonal influenza. Using climate anomalies derived from historical data, we found that simulated periods of anomalous climate conditions impacted both the projected influenza outbreak peak size and the total proportion infected, with the strongest effects observed when the anomaly was included just before the typical peak. Effects varied by climate: temperate regions showed a unimodal relationship, while tropical climates exhibited a nonlinear pattern. Our results emphasize that the intensity of weather extremes is key to understanding how climate change may affect influenza outbreaks, laying the groundwork for utilizing weather variability as a potential early warning for influenza activity.
Of the many mistakes made in the COVID era, none were as glaring as prolonged school closures. The damages go beyond loss of learning, a dire consequence in its own right: Millions of families, both children and parents, still carry the scars of stress, depression, and isolation.
The closures began at a time of understandable panic, but that was only the beginning of the story. On February 25, 2020, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, led a press conference to address the developing coronavirus crisis. Messonnier warned the public that, without vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions—things like business closures or social-distancing guidelines—would be the most important tools in the country’s response. “What is appropriate for one community seeing local transmission won’t necessarily be appropriate for a community where no local transmission has occurred,” she said. The school closures that would be implemented the following month—and that endured through the end of the school year in nearly all of the roughly 13,800 school districts in the United States, in regions that had wildly different infection levels—showed this directive was not followed.
Emerging and/or re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) in the East Africa region are associated with climate change-induced environmental drivers. There is a need for a comprehensive understanding of these environmental drivers and to adopt an integrated risk analysis (IRA) framework for addressing a combination of the biological, environmental and socioeconomic factors that increase population vulnerabilities to EID risks to inform biological risk mitigation and cross-sectoral decision-making. The aim of this integrative review was to identify knowledge gaps and contribute to a holistic understanding about the environmental drivers of Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), Marburg virus (MARV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infections in the East Africa Region to improve IRA processes at the environment-animal-human exposure interface.
THREE PEOPLE HAVE DIED in Texas and more than five hundred have gotten sick in what is shaping up as the largest single measles outbreak in decades. And somehow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still hasn’t provided a firm, unambiguous endorsement of vaccination, although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise in light of the publicity around an interview he had with CBS News last week.
The interview aired on Wednesday, after Kennedy had met with the families of two Texas girls who recently died from the disease. The online version carried the headline “RFK Jr. says people should get the measles vaccine,” and if you happened to be on social media at the time (like I was) then some version of it probably popped onto your feeds.
The blue rubber gloves and N95 masks in a Seattle senior living community used to mark a time of isolation, fear, loss.
Yet on a recent afternoon at Merrill Gardens in Ballard, these medical supplies are more like ornaments of the past, strung across the ceiling as an almost whimsical ode to how far we’ve come.
It’s been five years since the mysterious respiratory virus responsible for an emerging pandemic was identified in Washington state and the U.S., and forced millions of us, including hundreds of Merrill Gardens residents in the Northwest, to shut in, avoid physical contact and distance from one another for months.
Not today. On this particular gray Friday, residents and staffers are celebrating. Along with the PPE garlands, a colorful banner is pinned up in the window: “Heroes Work Here.”
“We didn’t lose a single person during COVID,” general manager Lisa Palm said, speaking just of the Ballard living facility, to a room of cheering residents. All were unmasked.
She raised a glass of Champagne. “Cheers to all that being in the past.”
Aggressive deportation tactics have terrorized farmworkers at the center of the nation’s bird flu strategy, public health workers say.
Dairy and poultry workers have accounted for most cases of the bird flu in the U.S. — and preventing and detecting cases among them is key to averting a pandemic. But public health specialists say they’re struggling to reach farmworkers because many are terrified to talk with strangers or to leave home.
“People are very scared to go out, even to get groceries,” said Rosa Yanez, an outreach worker at Strangers No Longer, a Detroit-based Catholic organization that supports immigrants and refugees in Michigan with legal and health problems, including the bird flu. “People are worried about losing their kids, or about their kids losing their parents.”
On Tuesday at a press conference, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his department's handling of measles cases, including the outbreak in Texas should be a "model for the rest of the world."
Kennedy said this is because cases have exploded more drastically in Europe -- though he didn't offer specifics on what he thinks has worked in the U.S. response.
"I would compare it to what's happening in Europe," he said. "They've had 127,000 cases and 37 deaths. And so what we're doing here in the United States is a model for the rest of the world."
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to imply in recent days that the measles outbreak in western Texas was slowing down.
In a post on X on Sunday, Kennedy remarked on the second death linked to the outbreak, which occurred in an unvaccinated school-aged child.
About 10 minutes later, Kennedy edited the post to add that the curve has been flattening since early March, when he started sending in reinforcements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- supplying clinics with vaccines and other medications.
"Since that time, the growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations have flattened," he wrote.
Slipping vaccination rates in West Texas have led to the state's largest measles outbreak in over 30 years, with more than 500 patients affected as of April 8 and cases spreading to New Mexico and Oklahoma. Last week, an unvaccinated Texas child died from measles, marking the third death tied to the outbreak.
Public health experts say there is a playbook for slowing outbreaks like this one: Identify cases. Isolate patients. Track where they've been and who they may have exposed. Most of all, drive up the vaccination rate.
Dr. David Fleming spent last week learning of the scope of the cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not through meetings with department officials or emails, but by text messages and news stories. As far as he knows, he said, there is still no official public list of the cuts. "This is unprecedented, both in the scale and scope of destruction of CDC, and unprecedented in the secret manner in which it's been being carried out," said Fleming, a public health professional in the state of Washington and chairman of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the CDC.
Read more at: https://www.macon.com/news/article303598321.html#storylink=cpy
Professor at Brown Univeristy School of Public Health and former CEO of GAVI, the vaccine alliance, Dr Seth Berkley championed equitable access to vaccines and co-founded Covax during the pandemic. In an interview with Sunday Times he watns of the repercussions of abrupt fund cuts
Excerpts:
As the Trump administration moves to dismantle international public health safeguards, pull funding from local health departments and legitimize health misinformation, some experts now fear that the country is setting the stage for a long-term measles resurgence.
If federal health officials do not change course, large multistate outbreaks like the one that has torn through West Texas, jumping to neighboring states and killing two people, may become the norm.
“We have really opened the door for this virus to come back,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On April 1, the Trump administration began making sweeping changes to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by firing thousands of staff, some of whom learned of this decision when they arrived at work on Tuesday morning and were not allowed to enter the building. According to HHS, the administration plans to reduce the HHS workforce from 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000. It is also consolidating the current 28 divisions into 15 divisions, and eliminating five of the 10 regional offices in the United States, among other changes.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed these changes as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, citing recent declines in life expectancy, while neglecting to mention that those declines were largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump administration’s stated goals are to streamline HHS, save taxpayer money, focus more on chronic illness, and make HHS more responsive and efficient. It claims it can make these reforms without impacting critical services. In practice, however, the administration has cut essential funding that was helping states and cities prepare for outbreaks; reassigned leaders who were stopping biological threats in other countries from spreading; undermined the United States’ ability to quickly review and approve treatments and vaccines during an emergency; and disrupted essential work to create vaccines, tests, and treatments for dangerous diseases. These approaches do not make America healthy. They make America less safe.
Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University's School of Public Health, leads the conversation on complex public health emergencies.
This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
About this episode:
For 25 years, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has been a global effort to purchase and distribute lifesaving vaccines to the poorest of countries and help them build up their health systems. Now, it’s the latest chop in a blitz of proposed federal funding cuts to global health. In this episode: an overview of Gavi’s innovative model that buys vaccines for 50% of the world’s children and has prevented around 19 million deaths, and the catastrophic potential if the U.S. withdraws its financial support.
Guest:
Dr. Seth Berkley is the former CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. He is a senior advisor to the Pandemic Center and an adjunct professor of the practice in epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. His new book, Fair Doses, will be released next fall.
Host:
Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, the largest center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Egg prices are dropping in the United States, pushing highly pathogenic avian influenza out of the political and economic spotlight. However, the disease won’t likely be cowed by the temporary reprieve, health experts have warned.
“I keep hearing a sort of a hope, a wish, and perhaps a belief ... that this is going to blow over,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, said at a panel focused on the U.S. experience with H5N1 bird flu. “I’m here to say that it’s not going to blow over somehow, that this is really a long-term situation that we have to deal with.”
Dallas, Texas – Therissa Grefsrud still remembers the email. The COVID-19 pandemic had been raging for nearly a year, and a woman had reached out to ask about vaccines: Would they cause infertility in her or her future children?
Grefsrud, a nurse specialised in infection prevention, had heard such concerns before. But studies show no link between infertility and vaccination of any kind.
Still, Grefsrud exchanged messages with the woman as she shared her fears. Then she pointed her towards the facts.
“She came to me about a month later and let me know how grateful she was for me making this space without judgement,” Grefsrud said. The woman also shared that she was now vaccinated.
Fast forward four years, and Grefsrud is among the healthcare professionals in Texas confronting a new outbreak: measles.
When Stephanie Psaki, a senior fellow in public health, joined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2021, she was tasked with helping coordinate the government’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
She then joined the National Security Council at the White House in the Biden-Harris administration where she worked for two and a half years. A scientist and an academic by training, she told The Herald she didn’t expect to move to this policy-focused role.
“I didn’t think that I was going to do this job when I was in undergrad or in grad school,” she said. “It never occurred to me.”
But now, Psaki has returned to academia, bringing her policy experience to Brown.
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”
But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun cancelling billions of dollars in funding for research related to COVID-19.
COVID-19 research funds “were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic,” according to an internal NIH document that Nature has obtained and that provides the agency’s staff members with updated guidance on how to terminate these grants. “Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary,” the document states. It is not clear how many of these grants will be ended.
What are the biggest threats to the health security of the American people? There are some strong candidates. Avian influenza is spreading in birds, cattle, and 50 mammalian species. Measles cases are surging at home and abroad. COVID-19 is still spreading and could mutate into a more deadly strain. Farther afield, Uganda continues to respond to an Ebola outbreak and Mpox has been seen in 127 countries. But perhaps the biggest threat to America’s health could be self-inflicted. According to a report published yesterday in the New York Times, our leaders intend to end funding for international immunization programs—including the Gavi Alliance I led from 2011 to 2023—that for decades have protected Americans from health threats abroad. These cuts would represent a grave threat to the health, well-being, and livelihoods of every American.
The United States cutting funding to Gavi, an organisation that provides vaccines to the world's poorest countries, could result in more than a million deaths and will endanger lives everywhere, the group's CEO warned on Thursday.
The news that Washington is planning to end funding for Gavi, first reported in the New York Times, comes as the two-month-old administration of President Donald Trump aggressively slashes foreign aid.
The decision was included in a 281-page spreadsheet that the severely downsized United States Agency for International Development sent to Congress on Monday night.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun cancelling billions of dollars in funding on research related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 research funds “were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic”, according to an internal NIH document that Nature has obtained and that provides the agency’s staff members with updated guidance on how to terminate these grants. “Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary,” the document states. It is not clear how many COVID-19 grants will be terminated.
A project to track and contain menacing animal viruses across seven countries, from avian influenza in poultry to Lassa virus in rodents, ended with a single email. In late January, Jonathon Gass, an epidemiologist and virologist at Tufts University, was about to leave for Bangladesh to close out an effort to monitor and combat avian influenza, when the emailed letter arrived from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), ordering an immediate halt to work on the $100 million STOP Spillover project. Gass, a co-deputy director of the project, stayed in Massachusetts and started to call staff around the world to tell them to drop everything. One colleague monitoring Lassa virus in Liberia was driving to a field site. “I had to tell him that he needed to turn the car around, come back, and book a plane ticket home,” Gass says.
The White House is nominating Dr. Susan Monarez, the current acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to lead the agency, President Donald Trump said Monday.
The move comes weeks after the White House abruptly withdrew its nomination of Dr. Dave Weldon to lead the public health agency.